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About Máirín Duffy

Máirín is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat. She is passionate about software freedom and free & open source tools, particularly in the creative domain: her favorite application is Inkscape. You can read more from Máirín on her blog at blog.linuxgrrl.com.

Does F12 have a tool which enables the rotation of the screen and tablet together? So that when you flip the screen round (as it looks like you have in that photo) it turns the screen upside down (manually or automatically) and also rotates/flips the wacom tablet too?

You can set that up (depending on your hardware, if it has the sensor required or not) but unfortunately F12 doesn’t do that out-of-the box. We do have a display settings applet that can be docked in the tray area that has a little dropdown that allows you to rotate the screen how you like.

Not sure if you can detect the rotation of the tablet, but I’m less bothered about detecting. I’m more interested in making sure the display and tablet are in sync. So if someone chooses left, right or inverted from the display panel doofer they get a rotated display and tablet together.

As I understand it “xinput list” tells us whether we have a tablet at all. I have seen scripted versions of this which use both “xrandr” and “xsetwacom” together. Would be nice to put a GUI on that though.

@Alan ah okay. I think it would be slick if you rotated it for it to detect that and automagically rotate the screen but your point about aligning screen and tablet position is certainly more practical. :) I used to have a script to do it, but it wasn’t worth the trouble – I don’t actually tend to turn my screen. I see how it would be quite useful though and a GUI tool to do it would be great progress.

It’s true that there is some binary blob wireless firmware in Fedora. However, you’ll note on the very page you linked to that the only ones included are licensed as being freely redistributable. So you won’t have to worry about being in trouble with the law for using them.

@JB I don’t know that it’s *the* critical freedom for Fedora. It certainly is a very important one for ME as a Fedora user. I occasionally do freelance artwork for clients and I definitely enjoy being able to hand them a functional live CD or bootable USB stick with the source files for their artwork, all the fonts (I only design with freely licensed, re-distributable fonts), and the software I used to make the designs so if I get hit by a bus or if they want to make some mods to the artwork they are free to do so without shelling out any more cash or having to reinstall their own machines or worry about buying licenses for fonts and all the rest.

By default, the stylus button on my x61 does a middle click (I actually quite like this as it allows me to pan around a drawing in inkscape with the pen without the tedium of interacting with the scrollbars.)

However, if you’d like it to be mapped to right click it’s one command:

I think we should build a UI to set these preferences. I can see how right-click would be useful for someone, but I enjoy my middle-click. It should also make sure the preferences are sticky (and I didn’t realize when I gave you that command that it wasn’t persistent, so I apologize for that.)

I believe Thinkpad Tablet models have an accelerometer built in for parking the HD in case of sudden movement (I know my X41 does). Can the data coming from the accelerometer be used to rotate the screen automatically if you hold it in portrait/landscape mode?

Neat. I remember when my IBM Thinkpad X41t’s tablet worked out of the box in F11. Now it doesn’t, and X crashes when using compiz or opening System Tools. I guess that’s the upgrade cycle. (Appropriate bugs filed.)

Hi Richard, i can’t say I’ve had the same problem with my x61 and I’m sure the technology is very similar to your x41. Actually, I used to get crashes in F10 when I first installed it, and the reason was that I had my old xorg.conf file – when I removed xorg.conf completely it worked wonderfully. I didn’t know I didn’t need it anymore so when I backed up my HDD from backup after installing I copied it over.

Lately I was quite busy and din’t got time for drawing, I wonder if having such a tablet would make me draw more – it my not be so, I don’t like drawing on the old Wacom I have, but instant on-screen coordination is something much better.